Episode #100 – 100th Anniversary Podcast

(J) Well Martha, we are out here singing “It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood . . .” because it’s the very end of fall. And, ah, really in our area almost all the color is gone. You go down the mountain a bit and it’s absolutely stunning and beautiful. We drove around yesterday and looked at the leaves and took some pictures, and umm, it’s just a grand time because it’s just so colorful. Even though we’re going into a season of gray, ah, it gives you such an explosion of color. And I just really am grateful. And I kind of feel like as a nation that’s kind of where we’re going. We had a little fall color, now we’re going into a season of gray. But ah, I wanted to first of all mention that this podcast is number one hundred. This is our centennial podcast. I think it’s pretty amazing that we have done one hundred episodes of this podcast. Towards the end of December it’ll be, you know, two years. And we’ll actually release the second year podcast on disc. We have currently available the first year. You can get it on two discs, and ah, which is kind of neat, and then coming January we’ll release the whole and complete second year. So happy birthday, happy centennial birthday! (M) Well it’s amazing. I can’t imagine that we’ve done a hundred. I don’t remember doing that many. (J) You know I really wanted to do little blurbs from, from them. But you know how much work that is? (Laughter) That’s a lot of work. (M) We don’t have time. (J) No, we didn’t have time. And we’re doing all the new booklets, and ah, ah “The Great Lie” is out, “Eternal Power” is out, and on November 19th, “The Foundation Of Repentance” will be out. So we’re on number three of the booklets, and we’ve just been working so hard on that, that ah, you know we just, it’s impossible. So anyway maybe next year, two hundredth episode, we’ll do a look back into, and give you blurbs. But umm, ah we’ve gone, think about it, you know we’ve gone to Israel, and we were at Mount Sinai; we were at Julia’s ah store, did that pod-cast; and we went to Spain and were on the Eurail; we were in New York City. This year we’ll be going to Ireland and we’ll be doing pod-casts there, as well as France, so we’ll be able to do pod-casts there, a little French pod-cast, and another Irish pod-cast. I mean you just look back; it’s just been so rich. (M) It’s such a journey. And I’m always amazed the feedback we get. Even from our own group we get enormous affirmation and encouragement about it. It’s always; it feels like we’re jumping off the deck of the ship when we do these things, because really we ah, don’t always know where we’re going or how it’s going to sound or what even, what we ourselves are going to say. I surprise myself, and you surprise me – often! (J) And we’re about to do that today. (M) Yes, we are, we are. This may be the scariest of all. (Laughter) But you know I ah, I was unabashedly for McCain. I got up at two in the morning – I was with the grandchildren – and, to see the results. And I’d had a sense of what was coming for about five days. So I began to cry. The Lord didn’t let me cry but thirty seconds. And He said come. And I just needed Him so badly to speak to me. Many believers feel that this is a really ah, going to be a dark time. Many believers are there. And He took me immediately to Daniel, and several other places. And He showed me something I have come to realize more and more, that there are two realms happening at the same time in this humanity, and in this world. There’s the realm where the Spirit is moving. And there’s the realm where humanity is moving. And they don’t intersect. They don’t even affect each other really. (J) Umhmm. (M) They’re two completely different realms. And we can live as believers, really, in both realms. It’s not the way it’s supposed to be. But we can be very much in our soul, and then very much in our spirit. But Daniel was aware of the government of God over the government that had captured him. And he was there because – he was there in the belief of that. And he functioned in that government regardless of what went on in the earthly government. It’s the most, one of the most, incredible stories in the Bible to me. I go back to it over and over again with different insights. He understood that sovereignly – He said the Lord took us to Babylon. I want to talk about this on the message of the month for December, because the prophecies of Jeremiah, Ezekiel and Daniel are so overlapped. And we don’t always see that as an influence. (J) Right. (M) Ah, but he operated so in another realm, that other realm of the Spirit, that the sense you get of Daniel is that he was completely unmoved. The fiery furnace, the demand to worship Nebuchadnezzar, the demand at the cost of his life to interpret a dream that he could only do if God told it to him. And he survived everything because he was in another government. And I know, John, and I’ve looked at a couple of places, a lot of the Body of Christ is into prophecy of what will happen, what disasters and different – and I know that some of them are valid. But it seems to me that for months now, that the Lord has had me with my eye on the return of the Lord. And I’ve often said we’re closer than ever. We have to be closer to it than ever. (J) Right. (M) And we’re warned in Scripture from the first century to watch and be ready for that, not disaster. Now there’s prudence and there’s, there’s being led of the Spirit. But for me the way to, ah we’ve been dealing with this in our midst, the way to be ready for the return of the Lord is to live each day in His will, and in His presence. The readiness for His return happens in your day, in your day-to-day life. There are tests and there are trials that expose what is in you. (J) Behind your plow so to speak. (M) Yes, behind your plow. And I am so excited about the Lord’s return. I got a glimpse of it when we went to Israel several years ago on the Mount of Olives. And His return to me is imminent. I don’t know whether that means ten days or fifty years, but His return is closer than ever. (J) It’s more imminent for you currently. (M) Yeah. (J) At the, at the silver years of your life, the golden years. (M) Yes, it is. But that’s really – and I was reading (T. Austin) Spark the other day, and he said the older years are not to be of decline. And certainly mine are not. (Laughter) Ah, he said the Life of Christ is such vitality and renewal that we should be flourishing in our later years. So it’s really not about my age. Even though that’s, you know, that’s a reality. It’s really about the fact that we’ll see Him soon. We will see Him. And, and I suppose it’s closer for me than most everybody. But ah, there is a great surge that’s happening to watch for His return. On the other hand, there’s going to be a tremendous new need of God, and that’s exciting to me. (J) Yeah. (M) We have to know His will; we have to be in His will. Someone recently confessed to me that they had never been willing to need the Lord. I began in need; I have functioned in need unendingly. I awaken and I go to sleep in need of Him. So this was quite a revelation to me, because a couple of weeks ago I asked you, “Why do people go back?” And someone graciously sent us the tape by the Sanfords called “The Bitter Root Judgment,” and that is, certainly in those two cases that I was aware of, that is certainly the root. But the real root is: “I will not need God.” And that’s from the garden. I will be self-sufficient. And so much of Christianity is this: the Bible says it, now go do it. (J) Right, right. Good luck. (M) Yes. And that’s never – the commands of the New Testament are addressed to the Life of Christ, who alone can do it. So I’m excited that in these days to come there’s going to be a new willingness and necessity and emergency to need to know the Lord, to know His will, His Life, His presence, His words, and the necessity to live in the transcendent government of God. The Kingdom is what that is. And, you know, Daniel faced it, faced everything, the, ah, threat of Nebuchadnezzar. And he gave him the worst possible news, and still the man decorated him. He – the second king came along with the MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN, and he gave him the bad news and the man decorated him just before he was murdered and taken out. And, but, so he lived in another government. Then, in his personal life, those who were jealous of him got him committed to the lion’s den. And they were hungry lions, meat eaters! (Laughter) And, ah, Daniel lived in a different government even in his own crisis. He went in there with calm. I think he’d been so rehearsed in that other government. And he was able then to see over the centuries and eons and ages to what that government was going to bring about in the times to come, in this very time we’re in. And, John, that is the government that we must look to. (J) Umhmm. (M) We need to look to that regardless of who is president. And someone in our group wrote me: “You are my president, You are my King. You, Lord, are my Master and Ruler no matter who is elected or not elected or whatever.” (J) Well, when I woke up, ah – I went to bed, I decided I wasn’t going to rile myself all up and hear the whole deal as it was going down. So I ended up going to sleep. And I woke up. And I just said, “Well, I’ll wake up and we’ll, we’ll, there it’ll be, you know, whatever it is.” So I woke up and I found out that Obama had been elected, and that McCain had conceded. And so I just kind of looked at the Lord and I felt like He said ok, now your life will begin. And I don’t know how that is all gonna play out. But I know that as long as ah, you’ve got the cushy pillows in your bed, you really won’t, you know, you really won’t shine. And ah, when your crises are real, um, ‘you centered’, you don’t shine. But now the crisis may be a little different and it might allow us to really, truly come to life and live dynamic in His life, and allow His life really to come forth. Because when you are in need – and we see this in Honduras, and we see this in other third world countries we’ve been in – when there is need, there is incredible faith. And when there is incredible faith, there’s incredible movement of God. (M) Umhmm. (J) And so, maybe we’ve just entered into a season of that. I don’t know exactly how it’s going to play out. And I, I’m going to stand to bless him, and I was doing that this morning. I’m going to bless Obama, for wisdom; I want him to have Godly wisdom. He is God’s choice. He is God’s choice. God chose that man, ah, because it says in the Scripture that no man is put into a place of government without God literally handcrafting, putting him there. So he is, he is the man for us during this hour. And so I’m not going to curse him; I’m not going to stand against him. I’m going to pray Godly wisdom in a – he’s going to find out a bunch of stuff now. He’s going to come in and he’s going to find out stuff as a senator he never, ever knew. And ah, he’s going to see deeper into the stuff out there that none of us know is really going on. And ah, I just pray for wisdom and for humility in dealing with that.

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